Eleanor Alberga (born 1949)
Eleanor Alberga is from Kingston, Jamaica, and decided at the age of 5 that she wanted to become a concert pianist. She began her music education in Jamaica and was introduced to the rich panorama of Jamaican music, including ska and reggae. She later performed with a Jamaican folk ensemble.
Eleanor Alberga also began composing at an early age. The catalogue of works on her website includes a one-minute piano piece from 1959 entitled Andy about her dog. In an interview, she said that at about the age of 12, she discovered the music of Béla Bartók, which she has said was “the first composer I really fell madly in love with.” She later continued studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and became involved with playing and improvising piano for a modern dance company. She continues to live in England.
Eleanor Alberga has composed two operas, and music for orchestras, choruses, piano, and chamber ensembles. While some of her music shows Caribbean influences, most of her compositions are in modernist (although decidedly accessible) European style.
I saw a performance of Eleanor Alberga’s String Quartet No. 1 by the Aizuri Quartet in November 2021, and described it in a blog entry like this:
The music begins ferociously with an aggressive unrelenting energy. There’s a rhythmically jagged forcefulness here that makes you want to bang out the beats, no matter how irregular they may be. When the music does calm down briefly, the tension and dense textures remain.
This is the first movement of Jamaican composer Eleanor Alberga’s String Quartet No. 1 from 1993, and despite the modernist harmonic and rhythmic language, it is traditionally structured in three fast-slow-fast movements…. The second slow movement has an austere magical beauty, while the third returns to the intensity of the first but with little tunes breaking out. At one point the cello becomes a walking bass, and a little later, all four instruments engage in a wonderful extended pizzicato section.
Eleanor Alberga has said that she based this quartet on extramusical ideas. Here’s her own description of the work:
In the case of the first quartet I was propelled into an intense burst of creativity by a lecture on physics. The details of this lecture — who gave it, where it was given, and so on — are now lost to my memory, but what grabbed me was the realization that all matter — including our physical bodies — is made of the same stuff: star dust. So the first movement might be called “a fugue without a subject,” as particles of this stardust swirl around each other, go their separate ways, collide, or merge. The second movement might be described as “stargazing from outer space,” while the finale re-establishes gravity and earthbound energy.
And here is Eleanor Alberga’s String Quartet No. 2 from 1994, which the composer has said has no extra-musical inspiration!
This is Eleanor Alberga’s sonically fascinating On A Bat’s Back I do Fly (2000) for piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, horn, and percussion, with a title from a speech by Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest:
The video begins with an interview with the composer; the music starts at about the 4:50 mark.
Here’s Shining Gate or Morpheus from 2012 for horn and string quartet: